YOU would be forgiven for thinking that the UK Government does not care about your future.

Take the pensions dashboard. First mooted by then Chancellor George Osborne in 2016, the idea behind the dashboard was to create a single place for savers to view and manage their work and state pensions with the wider aim of helping them prepare for retirement.

The need for such a service seems obvious, with people generally not saving enough to cover the cost of their twilight years and a worrying number saving nothing at all.

Read more: Delay to pensions dashboard is hampering people's saving

Yet despite a successful prototype being delivered under the management of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) last year, it now looks certain that the dashboard will not launch next year as planned.

Worse still, it appears that work and pensions secretary Esther McVey is planning to kill off the project altogether because she does not believe it is the state’s responsibility to provide it.

While this has so far not been confirmed, pensions minister Guy Opperman, who in October 2017 affirmed that “the dashboard will happen”, added fuel to the speculation when questioned by the Work and Pensions Select Committee this week.

“The long and short of it is, you’ll understand that this is a matter on which the Government has to make a decision. No decision has been made,” he said.

“When it has been made, it will be communicated in the appropriate and proper way, and it’s probably not appropriate for me to comment any further than that.”

ABI director general Huw Evans has urged the Government not to abandon the project, noting that while the pensions industry is “committed to helping” create the dashboard, it needs “Government involvement to ensure the system works fairly for everyone”.

Specifically, to ensure the dashboard achieves its stated aims, all pension providers would have to sign up to it, with legislation being required to make participation compulsory, he said.

Read more: Don't want free movement? Kiss your state pension goodbye then

Mr Evans warned that abandoning it “would be a huge let down to millions of savers, leaving them unable to find the money they have saved and even exposing them to fraud”.

James Walsh of the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association agreed, noting that as the dashboard “would be an essential tool for savers” it is “vital the Government sticks to its word”.

“With the average person now estimated to have 11 jobs over their lifetime, there is the potential for millions of lost pension pots in the future, which would mean savers losing out,” he said.

“The dashboard would be crucial in helping people keep track of their money and may even encourage people to save more.”

While auto-enrolment has ensured most workers are now putting cash aside for retirement, it has done nothing to address how people engage with their savings.

Indeed, recent research conducted by YouGov on behalf of workplace pension provider The People’s Pension found that 58 per cent of Scottish workers do not know how much they have saved for retirement while 20% do not know how many pension pots they have.

For Aegon pensions head Kate Smith, having a simple way of keeping track of individual pensions would not only better prepare people for the financial reality of retirement but would ease the burden on the state too.

“Auto-enrolment means that every job comes with a pension and keeping track of multiple pensions has proved difficult for many people,” she said.

Read more: Pensions Dashboard will not solve chronic under-saving problem

“Having a single source of pensions data, that tells people what they can expect from both the state and their private pensions should significantly boost people’s engagement and lead to better decision making, and less reliance on the state.”

In the meantime, while the Government mulls its position, it is probably worth digging out any pensions statements that have been shoved in a drawer to try to make some sense of your savings position yourself.

Because with the Government consumed with Brexit, and the Department for Work and Pensions taken up with rolling out universal credit and sorting out a series of overpaid pensions and underpaid benefits, it doesn’t look like the UK’s looming pensions crisis is going to be dealt with at an official level any time soon.